


A Lawyer And A Slayer Walk Into A Bar

by exposeyou



Series: Mergers & Acquisitions [3]
Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Boston, F/M, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Walk Into A Bar, Whiskey & Scotch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-29 11:20:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5125586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exposeyou/pseuds/exposeyou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lilah finds out what Faith is doing in Massachusetts - and meets with her new senior partners.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Lawyer And A Slayer Walk Into A Bar

Lilah was not nervous about her presentation to the Wickersham & Ropes senior partners. Given the senior partners at her old firm had owned her immortal soul and expected her to sacrifice her very mortal flesh in the line of duty, there was nothing her new bosses could do to scare her. Even if they were some of the most powerful men and women in Boston. Even if they could destroy the new little life she was tentatively building for herself with the flick of their pens.

She _liked_ living in the company-owned brownstone, even if it was temporary. She _liked_ the new workwear wardrobe she had treated herself to at the designer boutiques of the Prudential Center with her golden handshake, and she _liked_ the gangly six-month old Alsatian puppy that accompanied her on her daily runs and slept by her door, even if this surprised her. He accompanied her to work, where he spent the day in the Security Dept, and won admiring looks, pats and treats from her colleagues – some of whom had asked Lilah out for drinks at the weekend. Now she knew who she was and wasn’t going to be bringing into her department, she was minded to accept. And whilst Lilah wasn’t sure if she _liked_ her newfound friends, she hoped she would have time to make up her own mind, rather than having to flee another city.

She _had_ been somewhat nervous about her meeting with the rogue slayer. The investigator who had furnished Butler with Faith’s photo had also given them her apparent address. It was a cosy little place that looked far more expensive that she could possibly afford. For a brief second, Lilah missed Gavin and his ability to pull up property records in seconds. She would have liked to have known who was paying for the place – but didn’t want to arouse the senior partners’ suspicions by asking another department to look into something that would seem so incongruous with her work.

Lilah had already ruled out tailing the Slayer and showing up at her favourite haunts unannounced. From what she remembered, the girl was jumpy and trigger-happy – and she did not want to put her in a bad mood. Instead she had a card delivered to her cute little bungalow, inviting her out for drinks at the sort of bar Lilah imagined Faith might enjoy.

The biker bar was over in Somerville, and Lilah found it more difficult to choose an outfit for this plainclothes rendezvous than for her big presentation. As a workaholic, she didn’t need or own any casual clothes – unless you counted her Lululemon workout gear. Her office power suits just weren’t going to cut it. Lilah eventually settled on a pair of butter-soft leather pants and a charcoal-grey cashmere sweater, and still felt overdressed when she walked into Trina’s Starlite Lounge.

She arrived early so she could settle into a booth and take stock while she waited for Faith. She had a glass of bourbon (they didn’t run to scotch), her gun in her purse beside her, and her car was parked as close as she could get to the door. Unlike the old days, she couldn’t have a back-up team there in five minutes if things turned nasty. No-one knew where she was, because this wasn’t a company-sanctioned mission. This was Lilah’s own personal problem – getting the Slayer out of town so that she couldn’t screw things up for her. Again.

She checked her watch. Faith was now ten minutes late. Perhaps she wasn’t going to show.

_She checked her watch. She was five minutes early _for her meeting with the senior partners_. Good. Lilah smoothed down her skirt and slipped the USB stick containing her thrice-rehearsed Powerpoint presentation into the boardroom PC. _

Lilah was considering leaving when the younger woman slung herself in the booth. “Hey Li. No limo this time, huh?”

Lilah furrowed her brow. “How do you know how I got here?”

“I’ve been outside for half an hour, watching. Thought I’d make you stew.” The Slayer grinned, and accepted a bottle of beer from the waitress.

Great. She’d got herself a sassy Slayer who thought – no, _knew_ she had the upper hand.

_Lilah surveyed the room as people started filing in. Not a single face she didn’t know. No-one she hadn’t schmoozed, charmed, and got the measure of. She didn’t have her audience in the palm of her hand, not quite, but they had invested a lot of money into her and her project. They wanted to believe in what she was going to sell them – even if it wasn’t going to be quite what they expected._

Lilah tilted her glass at Faith and smiled. “I can’t say I don’t approve of the psychological warfare. I used to have quite a nice line in that myself. So what’s brought you back home, Ms Lehane? Miss the neighbourhood?”

“Hardly. It was never quite a white picket fence happy home. But since getting out of prison, what else can I do but go where the mission is? And now Sunnydale is a big hole in the ground…Here I am. Back on the job. Full-time slaying.”

“About that. The slaying. Wolfram & Hart is, like, Sunnydale, gone. I was there when the Beast tore through the building. I’m working in Boston now, for a different law firm. And they are quite different. They’re not – “

“Evil?”

_After the necessary pleasantries, Lilah cut straight to the chase. “You called me in because I am the sole survivor of Wolfram & Hart’s US operations. Whilst Wickersham is old, rich, powerful, well-connected and well-respected, Wolfram & Hart is all those things and more. Notice I’m not using the past tense. Whilst their American operations have been annihilated, they are a pan-dimensional firm. They’re still going strong across the world and into others. And they will come back. _

_“Lawyers are survivors, it’s true, but Wolfram & Hart are the cockroaches that can survive nuclear winter – often after they’ve caused it. If you were hoping we could copy their business model, steal all their clients and usurp their role – well, we could. Until they regroup and come back harder, faster, stronger, and destroy us. Literally.” _

_Lilah backed the little flourish up with a projection of pictures she’d stolen from her old employers. Images of friendly fire; of what they did to their own employees if they felt the need or the urge._

Lilah sipped her drink before answering Faith’s question. “Good and evil…I’m not sure those terms have much meaning any more. But if you mean ‘they’re not seeking to bring about the end of the world via the victory of demonkind over humanity’ then I would say, yeah, they’re not particularly evil. _But_ they are hoping to move into the supernatural market. And it would help if you could…well, not kill our clientbase.”

“You gotta be kidding me. You want me to stop fighting demons? Lilah, I’m a Slayer. You know what that means. Hunting and fighting and killing the baddies is what I was built for.”

The look of conviction of Faith’s face scared her. In their short time back together, Angel must have rubbed off on her. Or maybe it was that chirpy little Californian Slayer. Either way, this conversation wasn’t going to go as easily as she had hoped.

She fidgeted with her glass before speaking again. “And could you not… fight the good fight somewhere else? We’ve got money, we could help you relocate.”

But she knew it was a hopeless question before it left her lips.

 _“It’s my belief that Wickersham & Ropes does not have to stoop to the lows of Wolfram & Hart. No-one here wants to see their colleagues eviscerated. My former employers had to use such heavy-handed tactics because the stakes they were playing for were so high. Life and death become cheap when your company’s stock-in-trade is souls, destruction and preparations for a forthcoming apocalypse. _We _can’t play that game.”_

_Lilah shut the few murmurs of dissent down._

_“We don’t have connections in untold hell dimensions – the kind of connections it takes lifetimes to forge.  And we don’t_ need _to play that kind of game.”_

Faith just laughed at her suggestion. “Go somewhere else? Sure, if it were just me, Li, I’d go back to Cali and kill demons at night while I sunned myself on the boardwalk in the day. But it’s not just about me anymore. We’re talking a bigger picture.”

_“A law firm should never have been concerning itself with destiny. We all know how difficult it can be to defend criminal clients when you ascribe to rigid notions of what’s right and what’s wrong.”_

_She saw flickers of agreement on their faces, as she had known she would. They all went through that idealistic phase before it was beaten out of them in law school_ _._

“Tell me more. Another upcoming apocalypse? It seems like only five minutes ago that we had two on the west coast.”

Faith shook her head. “No. At least, not yet. The Watchers’ Council are rebuilding, stateside this time. Got their own little academy right here near Harvard.”

“And now the limey fuddy-duddies want their Slayer back? Faith, they abandoned you. As I recall from your file, didn’t they try to _kill_ you before you ended up in prison?”

“It’s different now.”

“You don’t honestly believe that they’re on your side, after everything they let happen to you? Faith –“

“And what, _you’re_ on my side? Little Miss limousines and diamonds? You don’t get it. They’re not on my side; _I’m on their’s_. Had enough time in prison to think it over, and I’m back on board with the mission. And that’s not the only reason it’s different now.”

Aware that things were getting more heated than she planned for, Lilah eased off on the attack and encouraged her: “What else?”

 _“At Wolfram & Hart, the day-to-day work was not just based on a five-year-plan – it was built around crumbling thousand-year-old scrolls that painted a picture of the future. It wasn’t a law firm, it was a temple built to furnish the return of dark gods, blindly inching its way towards a big shiny _destiny.”

 “You don’t know what went down in Sunnydale? B got witchy Willow to do a spell. There’s not just two Slayers in the world any more. We’ve got hundreds, maybe even thousands out there. And me and the Council are bringing together the ones we can, to train them.” Faith paused to let that information sink in, and Lilah realised how much the girl was enjoying herself. Bitch.

“Like I said, it’s different now. It’s not just me. Sure, you and Big Legal can pay for me to go away somewhere nice, but there will still be plenty of Slayers just like me, clearing up the streets round here of evil. If you’re planning on fronting for the Big Bad again, I’d advise you go do it someplace else. Ain’t no way Wolfram & Hart Two can survive here with a school of Slayers on its doorstep.”

For a second, Lilah felt her brownstone, the clothes, the breakfast meetings with Butler and tentative friendships break away from her. The last time she felt like that, she’d been standing in Wesley’s apartment.

 “So I have nothing to offer you. You don’t need the money, you don’t want to leave and even if you did, you’d be replaced. I can’t even threaten you. Well,” Lilah said as she leaned back and took a resigned swig of her bourbon, “I think I’ve been snookered.”

“Is that legalese or something? If you’re thinking you can just ask me to stay this side of the river, I’m afraid you’ve gotta forget that too, Ally. Council aren’t going to turn a blind eye to evil just because it’s in a different zip code. We’ll be patrolling in Boston when it’s needed.”

The ice in Lilah’s drink was melting and ruining it. Everything was slipping away, very fast, and she momentarily imagined smashing the glass into Faith’s head. That was childish. The Slayer was literally just doing her job and had even stopped gloating. She was just calmly laying out the facts.

“You know…Have you ever considered just _not_ working for the dark side? Hey, I managed to give it up, and I can tell you I sleep a hell of a lot better at night now.”

“Faith, you can spare me the Angel Inc pep talk. I’m a _metaphysical lawyer_. I can’t just take up baking and helping little old ladies cross the road. This kind of work _is my life_. “

Despite the good-natured comment, Faith was clearly getting bored of the conversation. She’d already peeled the label off her beer bottle. Lilah couldn’t say she blamed her. She was bored of listening to herself begging for a break.

“Don’t be stupid, Li. Like you say, you know Angel and Co. Not everything inhuman is evil. Hell, last time I was in LA they wanted me to kill Angelus and I risked my own life on demon junk to save Angel. I’m not saying you should join the peace corps. Can’t you just work for the spooky things that are a little less murderous?”

_“Ladies and gentlemen, we are not an ancient church at the whims of some shadowy god but a modern-day law firm. We have no higher power but the bottom line, and by calling me here so quickly and deciding to take on this kind of work, Wickersham & Ropes has already shown that it is nimble, agile, and ready to take each and every opportunity that comes our way.”_

_Lilah remembered her meticulous notes. They read ‘pause for applause’ at this point. She did so._

_“We don’t_ need _to copy a business model that, let’s not forget, just led to the destruction and murder of an entire office. We know our market. We know what works on the east coast. Let’s play to our strengths. Our divorce team is excellent. What about the old wizarding families who need to divide assets that don’t physically exist in this realm? Let’s have them come to us. Let’s build on our solid patent law background and start copyrighting new spells for enterprising mages – and helping them sell that intellectual property. Criminal cases with a demonic element – murder, kidnapping, extortion, all the old classics – they can be our bread-and-butter. And this company has strengths we have yet to capitalise on, too_ _.”_

_She caught Butler’s eye where he hovered by the door, and continued: “We have a first-rate security division here that has already made leaps and bounds in developing mystical protection in just a matter of weeks. Let’s start selling that expertise to our clients. Ladies and gentlemen, you see more in-depth discussion of these proposals, as well as the number work, in the handouts I’ve given you. But I can tell you that what I’m proposing we build here is not Wolfram & Hart Two. It will be sleeker, more nimble and utterly Wickersham & Ropes.”_

_Lilah Morgan waited a beat. There was that sound again. ‘Oh my,’ she thought to herself, ‘a standing ovation. I wasn’t expecting_ that _.’_

Lilah, bored and demoralised, had already put on her coat. “Well, Faith, this hasn’t been nice, let’s not do it again soon.” She tossed a handful of bills on the table to cover the cost of the drinks.

Faith gave her the once-over: “Say, that’s a nice coat.”

The compliment was so unexpected and the change of tone so strong that Lilah almost felt whiplash. “Oh, thanks, I got it from –“

“Did you know you’ve got dog hair all over it?”

Lilah pursed her lips and her knuckles turned white where they clutched her purse. She was not going to reply. She was going to walk out of this bar calmly and quietly and when she got outside she was going to find something to put a stake into.

Faith chuckled to herself as Lilah stalked across the room, then called out to her softly.

She turned on her heel. “What?” Lilah snapped, furious. “You want to gloat some more? Just because you screwed up your life and got thrown in jail doesn’t give you the right to sit there like the queen of fucking Massachusetts-“

Faith shrugged. “I just thought you’d want to know. I think he misses you.”

Lilah didn’t need to ask who she meant. She knew damn well. 

**Author's Note:**

> 'Snookered' is an English term that means to be forced into a corner or out of options. It comes from the game snooker, which is a billiards game like pool. Wesley taught it to Lilah, but Faith is unfamiliar with British pub sports (except darts, of course).


End file.
